More than a decade after his death of a heart attack at age 68,
Shel Silverstein's career avoids any defining label. Millions of
children have anointed him to beloved status thanks to poetry books
like Where The Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic, and a visit to
the website run in
tandem by Shel's estate and his longtime publisher, HarperCollins,
might convince you that his work for kids is his primary legacy.

Doing
so, however, neglects the full spectrum of what made Silverstein tick
as an artist. It rubs out the more than 40 years he spent in the bosom
of Hugh Hefner's Playboy empire, a veritable court jester at Mansion
gatherings when not traveling the world as the magazine's
cartoon-capturing foreign correspondent (see Shel Silverstein Around
the World, a coffee table-style compendium of reports from places like
Moscow, Spain, and Fire Island) or producing epic poems like "The
Perfect High" or "Hamlet As Told on the Street".

Sticking
only to the school-age side of the road means ignoring his prodigious
work as a songwriter (Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue"? Dr. Hook and the
Medicine Show's "The Cover of the Rolling Stone"? The Irish Rovers'
"Unicorn"? The Oscar-nominated "I'm Checking Out" from Postcards From
the Edge? All penned by Shel), his one-act plays for Off-Off Broadway
venues (which attracted the attention, and later friendship, of David
Mamet) and a tentative foray into crime fiction that, if not for his
premature passing, might have blossomed into something greater.

But
the most remarkable element of his non-children's-lit career was
Silverstein's nine albums worth of songs he recorded—and especially
the album's worth of unreleased material that might even surprise fans
of Shel's adult side.

As a recording artist, Silverstein
brought a raspy vocal style (not unlike Tom Waits's satanic older
cousin) that came from his teenage years as a Comiskey Park hot dog
vendor. And his firsthand knowledge of various scenes (Greenwich
Village Beats, the Chicago folk music world, Nashville's Music Row) led
to a varying array of song styles and production values. By the late
1960s, this songwriting acumen helped Silverstein move into rock
circles, thanks in large part to the New Jersey-based Dr. Hook &
The Medicine Show.

Dr. Hook also backed Shel on his most
commercially successful album, Freakin' At the Freakers Ball.
"Commercially successful" is a relative term for a group of raucous and
risque songs like Masochistic Baby." Shel sweetly intones that ever
since his baby left him, "I've got nothing to hit but the wall." Dr.
Hook gave it as much oomph as its own, Rolling Stone-cover-worthy album
Sloppy Seconds, adding a sense of gleeful disconnect to the whole
musical affair. The album cracked Billboard's Top 200 and recording
label CBS provided a marketing budget, something beyond Shel's
resources at the time. The one-sheet ad featured Shel, clad in a jean jacket,
patterned shirt and cowboy boats, and what can only be described as a
piratical beard, trumpeted as some sort of heir apparent to Gilbert
O'Sullivan (!)

But Freakers Ball was likely the
compromise point on a series of songs Shel recorded a couple of years
before the final album was released, songs with eye-popping titles like
"Fuck 'Em", "I Am Not a Fag" and "I Love My Right Hand.". Some of these
songsare available on YouTube. Others may wish to seek the bootleg.

The
titular track, so to speak, is astonishing. It starts out like a dirge,
with Shel intoning that he's "all strung out, his money spent/couldn't
even tell you where last year went/But I've given up payin' my bills
for lent/and now the landlord, he wants his rent..." a litany of
staggering and despairing proportions that demands only one answer:
"Fuck 'Em." What follows is a playful series of shrieking, baleful
grouses and complaints until Shel is at death's door, doing an uncanny
imitation of a tubercular cough, waiting to become "the Devil's
favorite pet." Then a strumming coda erupts, dissipating into a knowing
chuckle and "how's that" to the obviously amused producer behind the
glass door. Listening now, "Fuck 'Em" is all too apt for today's
turbulent economic times, when it would be great to dismiss mere
trifles like bills and rent and relationships knowing full well it
isn't so simple.

A
good two decades before the Divinyls teased a mass audience with "I
Touch Myself", Silverstein mined similar masturbatory territory in "I
Love My Right Hand" with considerably more bluntness. Rhyming "Some men
prefer adolescents" with "sexual acquiescence" is rather ballsy, not to
mention off the beaten phrase track. That said, considering the song
peters off into patter after about two minutes - admittedly,
deliberate, amusing patter about threatening to amputate the right hand
for daring to stray with other limbs and objects—it does feel like a
warmup for the similarly bawdy "Get My Rocks Off" performed with
deadpan aplomb by Dr. Hook's basso profundo George Cummings (and later
covered by Marilyn Manson, perhaps the last person one would associate
with Silverstein) and the biggest laugh of "Everybody's Makin' It Big
But Me", when nerdy Rik Elswit sings "they got groupies for their
bands/all I've got is my right hand."

Other tracks offer
additional clues to the recordings' origin and time frame. "Sausalito
Witch," about a pansexual being among the Northern California town's
houseboat community, required firsthand knowledge of this area, which
Silverstein wouldn't have gleaned until about 1969, when he bought a
boat and conducted a brief affair with the Playboy bunny who would
become the mother of his first child, Shoshanna, born the following
year. A near-verbatim demo of "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout (Would Not
Take the Garbage Out)", which appeared in final audio form on Freakers
and immortalized two years later as text in Where the Sidewalk Ends,
tuned a half-tone down and sounding as distant as a
several-generation-removed copy, which suggests this track, and the
others, may have been recorded for what became Freakers. And "Dope",
with another bravura hacking cough performance, has the same cheerily
moral tone of another Freakers track, "Don't Give a Dose to the One
You Love Most." That song was written in the late 1960s after Shel
spent time in the San Francisco neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury and
later performed by Dr. Hook as part of a television special about the
perils of venereal disease.

My
favorite track, though, isn't a song, but an outtake. "Julie's Working"
is a fine enough ditty about a henpecked guy sitting at home growing
increasingly frustrated as his wife earns the bread, but the outtake
reveals a lot about how artists fail, try again, fail harder, and
eventually succeed. Silverstein strums his guitar but he can't quite
get the words to start off the song, hemming and hawing and bursting
into guffaws to the point where the laughter overtake the music. Then
he gets the line, only to forget the next, collapsing once more into
infectious laughter.

Silverstein's manic laugh is the key to
these tracks' true intent. Over the days or weeks these studio sessions
took place, Shel Silverstein was just a guy having a great deal of fun.
There's an unnamed, open-voiced producer as an audience, and perhaps a
few suits who weren't as charmed by the material was never intended to
see the light of day. Such things hardly mattered, for Silverstein
didn't concern himself with entertaining a specific audience or worry
whether he offended people. He simply produced what his creative
impulses demanded at any given point in time.

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